Mary Arden's Cottage.
Autumn in England—and all the country ways of lovely Warwickshire are strewn with fallen leaves. But the cool winds are sweet and bracing, the dark waters of the Avon, shimmering in mellow sunlight and frequent shadow, flow softly past the hallowed church, and the reaped and gleaned and empty meadows invite to many a healthful ramble, far and wide over the country of Shakespeare. It is a good time to be there. Now will the robust pedestrian make his jaunt to Charlecote Park and Hampton Lucy, to Stoneleigh Abbey, to Warwick and Kenilworth, to Guy's Cliff, with its weird avenue of semi-blasted trees, to the Blacklow Hill,—where sometimes at still midnight the shuddering peasant hears the ghostly funeral bell of Sir Piers Gaveston sounding ruefully from out the black and gloomy woods,—and to many another historic haunt and high poetic shrine. All the country-side is full of storied resorts and cosey nooks and comfortable inns. But neither now nor hereafter will it be otherwise than grateful and touching to such an explorer of haunted Warwickshire to see, among the emblems of poetry and romance which are its chief glory, this new token of American sentiment and friendship, the Fountain of Stratford.
CHAPTER XIV
BOSWORTH FIELD
Warwick, August 29, 1889.—It has long been the conviction of the present writer that the character of King Richard the Third has been distorted and maligned by the old historians from whose authority the accepted view of it is derived. He was, it is certain, a superb soldier, a wise statesman, a judicious legislator, a natural ruler of men, and a prince most accomplished in music and the fine arts and in the graces of social life. Some of the best laws that ever were enacted in England were enacted during his reign. His title to the throne of England was absolutely clear, as against the Earl of Richmond, and but for the treachery of some among his followers he would have prevailed in the contest upon Bosworth Field, and would have vindicated and maintained that title over all opposition. He lost the battle, and he was too great a man to survive the ruin of his fortunes. He threw away his life in the last mad charge upon Richmond that day, and when once the grave had closed over him, and his usurping cousin had seized the English crown, it naturally must have become the easy as well as the politic business of history to blacken his character. England was never ruled by a more severe monarch than the austere, crafty, avaricious Henry the Seventh, and it is certain that no word in praise of his predecessor could have been publicly said in England during Henry's reign: neither would it have been wholly safe for anybody to speak for Richard and the House of York, in the time of Henry the Eighth, the cruel Mary, or the illustrious Elizabeth. The drift, in fact, was all the other way. The Life of Richard the Third, by Sir Thomas More, is the fountain-head of the other narratives of his career, and there can be no doubt that More, who as a youth had lived at Canterbury, in the palace of Archbishop Morton, derived his views of Richard from that prelate,—to whose hand indeed, the essential part of the Life has been attributed. "Morton is fled to Richmond." He was Bishop of Ely when he deserted the king, and Henry the Seventh rewarded him by making him Archbishop of Canterbury. No man of the time was so little likely as Morton to take an unprejudiced view of Richard the Third. It is the Morton view that has become history. The world still looks at Richard through the eyes of his victorious foe. Moreover, the Morton view has been stamped indelibly upon the imagination and the credulity of mankind by the overwhelming and irresistible genius of Shakespeare, who wrote Richard the Third in the reign of the granddaughter of Henry the Seventh, and who, aside from the safeguard of discretion, saw dramatic possibilities in the man of dark passions and deeds that he could not have seen in a more human and a more virtuous monarch. Goodness is generally monotonous. "The low sun makes the colour." It is not to be supposed that Richard was a model man; but there are good reasons for thinking that he was not so black as his enemies painted him; and, good or bad, he is one of the most fascinating personalities that history and literature have made immortal. It was with no common emotion, therefore, that I stood upon the summit of Ambien Hill and looked downward over the plain where Richard fought his last fight and went gloriously to his death.
